Colourful Vintage Wedding: Dean & Jen

With a surname like Wildblood, Dean and Jen’s wedding was never going to be boring. In fact they wanted their wedding to be just like them – quirky, stylish, fun and with a hint of vintage. Jen wore a Vivienne Westwood wedding dress and jewellery, and Dean looked dashing in his Reiss suit, Thomas Pink tie and Kurt Geiger shoes.

“It was really important to us that our wedding represented us and our tastes”, Jen wrote. “While we’ve been to a few modern weddings and they’ve been beautiful and elegant, we personally wanted something with an older, less polished feel. All my thoughts became cohesive when myself, my maid of honour Han and my mum went to I Do Vintage Wedding Fayre. I found everything there – the photographers, the cake makers, the lady who made my veil and garter and our music trio. I didn’t go to another fayre. This helped me focus my ideas and inspired me to use vintage crockery for the wedding breakfast, which was the major jumping off point for the whole feel of the wedding.”

“We could have rented crockery but we decided to source it all ourselves,” she continued. “We accumulated over 300 vintage side plates, dinner plates and tea cups and saucers. It took basically a year to get it all and it was a major team effort. My mum got a quite a few bits, as well as Dean and I from a couple of trips to Leominster, his mum from car boot sales and lots of other family and friends went on look out for crockery too. Some came from as far as France as some friends found some while on holiday! It was great, as it got everyone involved and into the spirit of the day.”

The wedding was held at Hagley Hall in Worcestershire but that wasn’t the original plan! “Our original wedding venue went into administration six months before the wedding which was very stressful. If we hadn’t have took out wedding insurance, we would have lost £3000! As with all insurance companies, it took them ages to let us know that our claim was successful, and then even longer to send a cheque so we were stuck in limbo for about a month and a half. So we were unable to book anywhere else as we weren’t sure if we’d have the money to do so. This is where Hagley Hall were our saviours. They say everything happens for a reason, and we were meant to get married at Hagley Hall. It is an exquisite building but also the staff are just out of this world. I was not stressed at all on the run up to the wedding or during the day as they just had everything under control.”

“I’m not a DIYer, I’m a ‘pay someone to do it for you’, kinda girl”, Jen laughed when I asked her about their décor ideas, “but Dean’s mum kindly made the chair bows herself from vintage floral and lace fabrics. She made over 85, all because of I was sick of seeing the same white chair covers at every wedding we had been too. Also, I bought a nasty old set of ladders from eBay for £16, which Dean painted then sanded, which we then used to display our table plan.”

“Dean, my bridesmaid Zoe and myself made the table plan and the place cards with some craft accessories I had bought, which is also where I got the craft clip-on birds which we used to hold the place cards on the table. What’s lovely is that quite a few people not only attached these birds to themselves throughout the day, like little accessories, but I’ve also been round some of our friends homes, and they are attached to lamps and plants. Just really sweet little reminders of the day.”

“My favourite things from the wedding were the flowers all arranged in teapots and vintage jugs, the macaroons in tea cups and also our table names. I’m slightly obsessed with dogs (dean’s tie had dogs on!) but specifically my two cocker spaniels, Jasmine and Jarvis, who, for obvious reasons, couldn’t be there on the day so we had to think of a way to involve them. We stole the following idea from my bridesmaid Katie. We decided to incorporate them into our name our tables which were named after famous people. I then found illustrator, Tom Knight, who drew and transformed Jaz and Jarv into these famous people. So Jarvis was drawn as Jarvis Cocker (his namesake), Jarvis Priestly (Elvis), Jarvis Sinatra, Jarvis Lennon, Jarvis Mercury (Freddie) and Jaz was Jazzy Hepburn (Audrey), Jazzy Monroe, Jazzy Winehouse and of course Jazzy Westwood (Vivienne). I still have the amazing illustrations now, up on our mantel piece in their vintage-esque frames.”

“My most important piece of advice for future brides and grooms would be GET WEDDING INSURANCE!!!” she concluded. “Do it NOW, before you pay for anything! The £50 or whatever they quote may seem like a cost you can cut but don’t. It may end up saving your wedding day! It saved ours!”